Hi everyone,
I'm interesting in identifying and then learning a programming language that can meet a few requirements. I'm a graduate student in psychology and am looking for a language that can be used for experiments in a research setting. I think that what I'm looking to do would fall under the category of games from a programming standpoint. Several examples of what I'm looking to do are:
1. Generate several nonsense words and assign them values. Ask the participant about relationships between the nonsense words based on their values (hidden), and give feedback based on correct or incorrect answers. Keep track of response time per trial. Export things like participant identifier, score, and time to a CSV or excel file.
2. Flash stimuli (pictures, words) on the screen quickly (milliseconds - the participant wouldn't be able to report what they were) followed by a question to see if the stimuli will "prime" a particular response, or make it more likely. (e.g., does flashing the word "green" on the screen make it more likely the participant will answer the question "What is your favorite food?" with a green food, even though they can't tell you what word they saw?)
3. Other various tasks, such as presenting participants with a series of questions and recording their answers, or playing a brief movie and asking questions about it afterwords.
4. I'd like to be able to use point-and-click interfaces - my learning experience with Python has limited me to text so far.
Hopefully that gives you a good sense of the types of things I'm looking to do. Being that I'm a graduate student in a field other than programming, I need a language that can give me the biggest bang for my buck with regards to difficulty and time investment. So far, I've spent a decent amount of time learning Python - I've done all of the Codeacademy lessons, read "The Quick Python Book" cover to cover, and have learned enough to cobble together code to create a text-based version #1 above (all keyboard, no mouse).
I guess my question is - based on my needs, do you think I'm learning the right language? Or should I consider this time well spent as an introduction to programming and dive into something else like C++, Java, Objective C...? I've searched the forums, but would find an answer to my specific questions helpful. Thanks in advance!